Charles Lindbergh

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life.

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?

In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced sucess with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.

We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow.

We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.

There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation.

I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress.

If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks.

You ask what my conclusions are, rereading my journals and looking back on World War II from the vantage point of quarter century in time? We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense, it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.

I don't believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished if we don't take any chances at all.

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over the Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.

I believe the risks I take are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead.

Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored airplanes at night.

Lying under an acacia tree with the sound of the dawn around me, I realized more clearly the facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared [with] a bird; that airplanes depend on an advanced civilization, and that were civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind - qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.

The construction of an airplane is simple compared with the evolutionary achievement of a bird. If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.